The Impact Of Social Software & Online Communities On Enterprises Suffering From Inflated Software Licensing Costs
There are several financial arguments for taking a social networking platform for business and investing in building an internal collaboration platform or internal community for an enterprise or business. There is reduction in travel expenses, creating a better communication platform which can reduce phone expenses, allow for flexibility of employee and partner location, reducing workspace costs and more. To really be able to justify investing in an internal social software platform to the financial heads of a business there needs to be a strong case but with clear cost benefits, it comes across as a sensible move. Let’s take a closer look into just one cost that several enterprise businesses spend a small fortune on “software licensing costs”.
In a typical enterprise business environment, you’ll find different kinds of stakeholders –including different types of employees, partners and so on. They may each have very different computing requirements: some quite basic and some may need more extensive software capabilities. Yet, most businesses issue similar hardware and provide standard installations of software across the board.
Now, an employee in sales may need the latest version of Microsoft Office and SharePoint to create and upload sales presentations and share documents, but someone in another function may not. The practice or need to install a fresh license of collaboration and communication software like SharePoint, Lotus Notes and other groupware for every new employee or stakeholder that’s now part of the wider organizational network can be expensive.
Just imagine in a larger organization how much that could add up in license fees each year? To think some of the employees may need an additional user license just so that they can use the internal messaging, instant messaging, or group notification function within the organization, is it really a justified cost?
This is where social networking and business collaboration software can play a crucial role in reducing unwarranted licensing costs. By migrating a lot of the common everyday internal collaboration and communication functions to an internal social software platform and making that the core internal interaction platform for the business the dependency on more expensive licensed copies of other software can be drastically reduced. Once that dependency on that software is gone, it will end up being used only where it is really required and doesn’t have to be used across the board just because that’s the standard internal platform the company works on. Most businesses have been stuck in this trap of having to invest a considerable licensing fee every time they add on a user or need to scale perhaps for a lack of a better solution. Now that there is good solution that is cost effective, scalable, and makes good financial sense, should we still be paying those inflated licensing costs each year?
